


A strange, far country

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Endgame, F/M, POV Female Character, Post-Canon, Speculation, The Battle for the Dawn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-05 00:37:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16357262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: Near the end, Daenerys finds joy amidst all the terror.Even if it seems too late, such a thing can never be too little.





	A strange, far country

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tywinning](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tywinning/gifts).



> A week late with Starbucks, BUT, happy birthday Lauren, ILY!! I hope you had a wonderful day <3

The world looks so very small, from up so very high.

Below them is darkness - the forests that blanket the mountains here are dense, spiny trees packed so close together that she doesn’t know how the wights manage to push through, and the rock that shears up through the snow and trees is basalt, or something similar. It stands Targaryen black against the Stark white of the snow, and Dany would laugh, if her breath weren’t swept away.

Jon is silent too, away on Viserion’s back. Drogon roars, though, echoing off the scree and between the trees, and somewhere in that light-and-dark below, shocking blue eyes turn skyward.

Tyrion laughs. They fly onward.

 

* * *

When Dany arrived at the Wall, she did not expect much.

She still expected more than this, truth be told, but still - not much. And she was no stranger to hardship, so it did not worry her overmuch, but even so.

This was the last guardian of the world?

“Welcome to Castle Black, Your Grace!” someone hailed her. When she turned, she found a man of about her own age, with a solemn face and a scarred-about eye. “Will you come inside? We have bread and salt, and hot spiced wine as well.”

He bowed neatly at the waist - more formal and more easy than she would have expected of these savages Tyrion and Ser Barristan both warned her of. She had the sketch of the Night’s Watch from Jorah, several lifetimes ago, and more detail from Ser Barristan, but it was Tyrion who had been most recently at the Wall, and Tyrion who had told her the bones of things now.

It seemed that even his intelligence was stale. She really ought to have been used to that by now, and yet here she was. Viserys had told her stories of their ancestress, Good Queen Alysanne, and her journey to the Wall - they had not done justice to their subject. Either to the Wall or, Daenerys suspected, the woman.

“I am Jon Snow, Lord Commander,” the man said, guiding her toward the crumbling castle. “Have you no guards, Your Grace? I will guarantee your safety as best I can while you are here, but it would do no harm for you to keep a sword or two by you-”

Drogon screamed, and Dany couldn’t help but smile. 

“I think, Lord Snow,” she said, “that I have protection enough without any swords.”

 

* * *

The air is cold, true, but it is also shockingly clear. Daenerys breathes deep, filling her lungs until she has no more space, and letting it out on a whistle.

Jon looks over as if surprised by the sound, and she wishes she could reach to take his hand. Drogon and Viserion might object if she tries, though, so she contents herself with a smile and a shrug. He returns both without a word, and they fly on.

Daenerys breathes in another too-full gulp of crisp air, and wonders how many more lie between here and the end of the world.

 

* * *

“Well,  _ you’ve  _ certainly come up in the world, Jon Snow!” Tyrion laughed, reaching down from his saddle to clasp Jon’s proffered hand. “Well met, ser - you’ve met the Queen?”

“And her mount,” Jon said, scratching idly at the scar on his neck, mostly hidden by his beard. They didn’t itch, exactly, but he was aware of them in a way he was of no other scar on his body, and he preferred not to think too hard on that. “You seem better than I expected, given the rumours.”

“Says the dead man,” Tyrion returned, sliding from the saddle to give Jon the most sardonic look he’d ever experienced. “You’ll have to tell me about that one, Snow, once we’ve dealt with these monsters.”

Jon hadn’t told anyone his suspicions about just how intimately Melisandre’s magics were tied to those of the Others, and how his own survival was bound up in all of that, and he didn’t intend on doing so now.

“The Queen isn’t what I expected, either,” he said instead, which made Tyrion smile feral and toothy.

“You are not the first to say that,” he said, “and you will not be the last.”

Tyrion’s walk was worse, if anything, but Jon didn’t say anything about that, either. He couldn’t afford to, not with his limp and his hand and his eye, and his recent death.

 

* * *

There are valleys in the mountains below them filled entirely with lakes. Silver-blue and crystalline, they catch the starlight and shatter it back up into the world, like diamonds among the shadows of the murky forests.

Here and there are sapphires, all-seeing eyes turned skyward to track their progress. Dany does her best to ignore those, not out of fear so much as inevitability. 

Once their journey is at an end, there will be no more of those terrible eyes to see anything at all. That will be worth the frostbite nipping at Dany’s fingertips, the hack of Tyrion’s cough, the strange pallor of Jon’s cheeks. That will be worth all of it. 

 

* * *

Viserion circled and circled and circled, and descended at last when Jon came forth from the castle.

“Well,” Tyrion said. “That’s answered one question.”

Dany laughed, and remembered a blue rose growing from a chink in a wall of ice, and remembered stories of Lyanna Stark, named a whore by Viserys and a victim by her nieces at Winterfell. Jon Snow, with his direwolf at his heels as he stepped forward to greet her dragon - his dragon, now - seemed somehow unreal.

“And raised a dozen more,” she said, once she had control of herself again. “No matter - we will take this in stride, as we have everything else.”

“Is that how we’re describing it?” Tyrion asked, sipping from a flask. “And here I thought we were as confused as everyone else.”

Dany laughed, because there was no other choice. The whole world was going absolutely mad, and this was no stranger than anything else she’d witnessed these past wild years.

“Tell me, Lord Lannister,” she said, “everything you know about this Jon Snow. Will he turn my my dragon against me?”

“He’s a Stark,” Tyrion said. “Might be that he has no love of the crown, but he will fight to the death to defend the North - what better way to do that than to turn the dragon against these demons?”

Tyrion had proved himself a less capable judge of character than he believed, in Dany’s experience, but she felt that he was right in this. She had learned to trust her instincts, and she felt that Jon Snow was to be trusted. 

Perhaps it was only because she knew he had been betrayed by his men, which surely made him cautious. She knew how that felt better than she would like.

 

* * *

Tyrion’s hair is buffeted into a lion’s mane around his face, bright and wild and pure spun gold against the dawning sun. He laughs whenever a fresh gust of wind catches him, and Rhaegel keens joyfully in response. 

Jon is like his shadow, with his hair pulled back and his solemn, kind face. Daenerys is glad to have them here, like the masks above a Braavosi theatre door, because they in their contrasts remind her just why she is here at all. 

The world needs her to do this. The world is demanding this of all of them, and while she is heavy-hearted, she is not sad. There is a great deal to be said for giving your soul to save the world.

 

* * *

When Jon Snow’s sister emerged from the bedraggled, beleaguered army that rode north from the Riverlands, he smiled, and Daenerys was amazed to find that long, plain face appealing. 

She had always preferred a more striking man - Drogo’s strength and towering power, Daario’s presence and flair - but there was something about the quiet steadiness of the Lord Commander being set alight by the joy of seeing his sister that made Dany take heed. 

He caught her eye over his sister’s head, and Dany smiled in answer to his happiness. She could not imagine ever being so happy to see Viserys, but perhaps had she known Rhaegar, she might have known that particular pleasure. 

Or not - she didn’t know which stories of Rhaegar to believe, but mayhaps she could’ve been close to her niece and nephew. She might have had the sort of contentedness Jon Snow obviously recalled in his sister’s arms.

“There’s another sister,” Tyrion said, suddenly at her elbow. “My wife, in fact. I think I may release her, when this is all done, and then she may be convinced to spare me when she and the rest of the realm begin their plan to exterminate House Lannister.”

“You’ve told me of her,” Dany said, pressing her hand to his fur-bound shoulder. “Although since you’ve mostly done so while deep in your cups, I might forgive you for telling me of Lady Sansa and her red hair and her soft heart - and besides, she was at Winterfell when I was there.”

Tyrion’s face flooded deep Lannister crimson, and not from the cold, and Daenerys wondered if it was possible for Tyrion to be happy. He had told her of his little wife while drunk, it was true, but he had also cried about his first wife, just the once. He never cried about Jon Snow’s sister, lamenting only that he wasn’t sure which of the two of them had been more cruelly punished by their forced marriage.

She suspected that he felt himself the greater victim, even though the weight of the pain undoubtedly lay in the other direction.

“The Starks were traitors to my family,” Daenerys said. “Should that treachery be forgiven?”

“My family slaughtered every part of yours they could lay hands on,” Tyrion said, his voice thoughtful and a little murky, dark as it only became when he spoke of his brother and sister. “And yet you have forgiven me, more or less.”

“More or less,” she agreed, smiling again to Jon Snow, and moving forward to meet his sister.

  
  


* * *

Daenerys wonders what her son would have looked like.

Rhaego remains a solid vision in her heart’s eye, with her hair and Drogo’s beautiful eyes, but the child she might have had with Jon, the pink little babe she would have left in Arya Stark’s arms? Him she does not know. 

They would have called him Aemon, the son they will never know, and entrusted him to Jon’s sister, because who else was there who would not seek to seat him on an unhappy throne? Let him remain in Winterfell, loved and guarded and, maybe, spoiled. She likes to think that Jon’s brothers and sisters would have spoiled their nephew, even if he did not look like Jon, or have Jon’s quiet manner and gentle smiles.

She looks to her left and finds one of those gentle smiles waiting for her. She likes to think that their Aemon would have had Jon’s smile, but thinks it best that he not have Jon’s hair when her own is possible.

 

* * *

“Your Grace?” Jon called, and she waved him into the room given over to her as a solar. Castle Black had become the hub of all this ludicrous action, now that they had pushed back north from Winterfell, and she was smothered by raven after raven.

Never a white raven, of course - not until all of this was done. She was coming to realise just what that might entail, and had told Tyrion. 

She had not yet been able to tell Jon. How could she face him with such a horrible truth so soon after he had found his family once again?

His Maester Samwell had brought her the books and scrolls, and her dreams had been all in the trees since they had been turned from Castle Black. At Winterfell, it had been all weirwoods - blood spilling over white, red leaves on pale skies, a pale face with bloodied eye and bloodied mouth whispering to her of her fate, and the fate of all the world. Here though, it was trees budding in spring, green and new, and the face that told her of the future was that of a boy with a solemn air not unlike Jon’s. Man and boy and maester all agreed - only sorrow could save the world.

“Come in, Jon,” she said wearily. “Come, sit with me.”

He took the seat nearest hers, a little wooden stool where Missandei usually sat, and had a time of it, arranging his sword. “I wonder,” he said. “How much longer  will it be before we must move forward with this?”

This being their battle plan. This being their next step north against the horrors of the Long Night, their next move towards dawn.

“Another month,” she said, reaching over to touch his hand. “Then we will be ready to move forward. Until then, we must endure.”

And endure they would, as they had for the better part of a year already - beaten back to Winterfell, beating forward to the Wall as it fell, and now, inevitably, beyond the ruins of the Wall and into the wild north yonder. 

 

* * *

The trees have disappeared by the time they reach the highest mountains, revealing quartz-shimmered granite that catches the peeping sunlight, cresting like stormclouds against the purple-black of the sky.

Even Tyrion’s laughter has stopped by now, in the face of dawn away eastward and an end away north. 

The end of the world is near, and because of that, the world is saved.

 

* * *

“There has to be another way!” Jon’s sister insisted, tugging on his arm, his wolf and hers twining together around her. “Please Jon! Please, there must be something else!”

“Do you think we’d do this if there was another choice, Arya?” he said gently. “Do you think we’d leave everyone? Leave  _ you?” _

Dany wrapped her arm through Jon’s, hoping to direct any anger Arya felt to herself, away from Jon - she couldn’t have Jon’s final moments with his sister be spent in anger. She understood that sort of haunting all too well, and wondered briefly if this grand death would free Viserys’ shade from her shadow.

“The dragons must reach the end of the world,” Dany said, “and they won’t fly that far without us. We have no choice, Lady Stark - it must be this way.”

Brave, faithful Irri came forward then, with furs to wrap over Daenerys’ shoulders. 

“If there was another way,” Dany said,  _ “nothing  _ in this world would keep me from him.”

Drogon screamed, and Dany felt like joining him. It was all so monstrously unfair, but there was no other way. If all the children she swore to protect were to live, this was the only way. It had to be thus.

“Then fly true,” Arya Stark said, pushing the wolves back behind her with firm, gentle hands,. “If this is what it takes, do it well. We will make sure the world knows, when the time comes.”

Tyrion and Rhaegel were already circling high in the sky, without anyone to wish farewell. He left a will with Maester Samwell naming his siblings’ daughter, his father’s last heir, as Lady of Casterly Rock - Dany had signed the legitimisation decree, because this was all she had to give Tyrion. She wondered if Myrcella Waters would miss her uncle, if the girl would be grateful to him, and decided it didn’t matter. Tyrion was buying immortality and forgiveness both for himself with this last grand gesture, and-

_ “It’s him _ !” 

The cry rattled in Dany’s bones, under the endless night - Arya’s narrow face went hard and bloodless, and her narrow sword was in her hand in a heartbeat.

“I’ll see him safe,” she promised. “Safe journey, Your Grace. Jon-“

“I know,” he promised her. “Tell the others-“

“We know,” Arya assured him. “Now, go! Before that thing reaches you!”

Arya was a tiny dot racing northwards in the midst of guards and torches, visible until they cut through the low clouds.

The howl of the King of the Others followed them into the stars, and Daenerys prayed to uncertain gods - every god she had ever met, in all her travels - that Brienne of Tarth truly was the finest sword of her generation, and that Bran Stark, from his deep throne, had not led them wrong.

 

* * *

The light of the curtain is pale gold, like a beeswax candle, and yet still cuts harder than the nearly-there sunrise or the still-watching stars. 

“Here we stand, we three wanderers,” Tyrion says, his quiet voice carrying over the noiseless glide of their dragons’ wings, “at the end of all things.”

“And the beginning,” Jon says, and no more.


End file.
